A Frank & Earnest Diary of a solitary woman documenting her stuggle to maintain a degree of sanity & order in her life while growing old and older in a kaotic seemingly OUT OF BALANCE world. Always a loner but never alone, reclusive by choice but living life of late vicariously through the mysteries & wonders of the world-wide-web, - Onward & Outward bound she ventures daily, pajama-clad into its "meanstreets & crowded highways," --and she IS NOT afraid!

Rock On

A Little Bit About Me'Self

Lifetime Student in school of Hard Knocks.Born in Troy NY home of UncleSam,FALLOUT Capital of the Nation(google"The Troy Incident")other places I called home; Tucson & Bullhead City, Az., Seattle,Wa.,Taos,Ojo Caliente &Santa Fe,NM, LasVegas,Searchlight,Goodsprings,Jean,& Laughlin,NV.,San Francisco, Ca.,Portland,Or.,just 2 name a few. Places I have worked are bars, horse & dog tracks and casinos, and, later in life,law firms & with lawyers. Now in retirement,I stay home & mind my little mini-farm. In my spare time I pretty much live vicariously through the wonders of the www. I guess you could say (ala Eddie Rabitt) that I am - bloggin my life away,....lookin for & workin towards a better day, ohhh yeah. But however you look at it, there aint no gettin' around it, I'm jus' an ole' x-hippy-chick, struggling ever "onward through the fog" of life,....still here, still standin,..still laughing, after all these crazy years, and whats more amazing yet, still with at least some functioning brain cells!(Though through absolutely no fault of my own. Thank U geezis or whatever powers that be!)

Tuesday, December 16, 2008

An ambitious and risky undertaking carried out with hubris, and featuring the weeding out of anyone who raises alarm bells, little-to-no transparency, an oversight system in which no central authority is accountable, and the deliberate manufacturing of ambiguity and complexity so that if -- when -- it all falls to pieces, the excuse "who could have known?" can be used....

Is it Iraq? Fannie Mae? Citigroup? Bernie Madoff?

The correct answer is: all of the above.

When you look at the elements that were crucial to the creation of each of these debacles, it's amazing how much in common they all have. And not just in how they began but in how they ended: with those responsible being amazed at what happened, because...who could have known? Well, to paraphrase James Inhofe, I'm amazed at the amazement.

In fact, when historians look for a name that sums up the Bush II years, they could do worse than calling them The "Who Could Have Known?" Era.

Each of the disasters listed above was entirely predictable. And, indeed, was predicted. But those who rang the alarm bells were aggressively ignored, which is why it's important that we not let those responsible get away with the "Who Could Have Known?" excuse.

Let's start with Iraq -- specifically the reconstruction of Iraq. This weekend the New York Times got its hands on the unpublished 513-page federal history of the reconstruction. It's not pretty. As the Times puts it: it was "an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure." As a result, almost six years and $117 billion later, many essential services are only now reaching pre-war levels.

The report quotes Colin Powell on how the Pentagon, to cover up its failures, "kept inventing numbers of Iraqi security forces [that had reached readiness] -- the number would jump 20,000 a week! 'We now have 80,000, we now have 100,000, we now have 120,000.' "

Hmm, making up numbers to realize a short-term gain, but which end up making the inevitable long-term reckoning much worse? Sounds a lot like what was happening at Citigroup at around the same time.

In late 2002, Charles Prince was put in charge of the company's corporate and investment bank. The banking giant was already knee deep in toxic paper and aggressively looking the other way.

He was so successful at averting his eyes that when, five years later, as Wall Street began to feel the initial shocks of the mortgage meltdown, he was told that the bank owned $43 billion in mortgage-related assets -- it was the first he'd heard of it. Isn't that something he should have known? Or did he prefer not knowing?

Prince had plenty of help ignoring the obvious, particularly from Robert Rubin. According to a former Citigroup executive quoted in the long New York Times analysis of Citi's downfall, despite ascending to the top of the Citi food chain, Prince "didn't know a C.D.O. from a grocery list, so he looked for someone for advice and support. That person was Rubin."

When it all came tumbling down, both Rubin and Prince portrayed themselves as helpless victims of circumstance, because...Who Could Have Known?

"I've thought a lot about that," Rubin said when asked if he made mistakes at Citigroup. "I honestly don't know. In hindsight, there are a lot of things we'd do differently. But in the context of the facts as I knew them and my role, I'm inclined to think probably not."

What he means, of course, is the facts as he chose to know them.

Prince's head is even higher in the clouds: "Anything," he said, "based on human endeavor and certainly any business that involves risk-taking, you're going to have problems from time to time."

Sounds like he's reading from the same damage control playbook as former Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines. According to Raines, he can't be blamed for what happened at Fannie Mae because mortgage stuff is so, well, complicated. In fact, he can't even understand his own mortgage: "I know I can't and I've tried," Raines told a House committee last week. "To this day, I don't know what it said... It's impossible for the average person to understand" mortgage terms such as negative amortization. In other words, Who Could Have Known?

Committee chair Henry Waxman wasn't buying it: "These documents make clear that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac knew what they were doing. Their own risk managers raised warning after warning about the dangers of investing heavily in the subprime and alternative mortgage markets."

Ignoring warning after warning is an essential element of the "Who Could Have Known?" excuse, as are rewriting history and shamelessly disregarding the foresight shown by those who sounded the alarm bells.

We're seeing the same ingredients in the Madoff affair. "We have worked with Madoff for nearly 20 years," said Jeffrey Tucker, a former federal regulator and the head of an investment firm facing losses of $7.5 billion. "We had no indication that we...were the victims of such a highly sophisticated, massive fraudulent scheme." It's a sentiment echoed by Arthur Levitt, the former chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission: "I've known [Madoff] for nearly 35 years, and I'm absolutely astonished."

Who Could Have Known?

Well, Harry Markopoulos, for one. In 1999, after researching Madoff's methods, Markopolos wrote a letter to the SEC saying, "Madoff Securities is the world's largest Ponzi Scheme." He pursued his claims with the feds for the next nine years, with little result.

Jim Vos, another investment adviser who had examined Madoff's firm, says: "There's no smoking gun, but if you added it all up you wonder why people either did not get it or chose to ignore the red flags."

The answer comes from Vos's cohort Jake Walthour Jr., who told HuffPost blogger Vicky Ward: "In a bull market no one bothers to ask how the returns are met, they just like the returns."

Hasn't the "Who Could Have Known?" excuse been exposed as a sham enough times to render it obsolete?

Apparently not. Here come the Bush Legacy Project's revisionists expecting us to believe that everyone thought Saddam had WMD -- even though many were on record saying he didn't.

In the wake of 9/11, Condi Rice assured us nobody "could have predicted" that someone "would try to use an airplane as a missile." Except, of course, the government report that in 1999 said, "Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House."

After Katrina, the White House read from the "Who Could Have Known?" hymnal: No one could have predicted that the storm would be a Category 5, and that this could result in the levees being breached. We now know, of course, that plenty of people knew that the levees could be breached and said so before the storm hit.

Then there is Alan Greenspan, who, looking back in October of this year on the makings of the financial crisis he helped create (I mean, that just happened to come out of nowhere) delivered this "Who Could Have Known?" classic: "If all those extraordinarily capable people were unable to foresee the development of this critical problem...we have to ask ourselves: Why is that? And the answer is that we're not smart enough as people. We just cannot see events that far in advance."

The only problem is, many people did see events that far in advance.

Unlike Greenspan, I don't believe the problem is that we are "not smart enough as people." As we've seen time after time, smart enough people are all too willing to ignore facts they don't like. Or, even worse, they construct oversight systems designed to be ineffective -- and unable to provide to those in power information they don't really want to know.

Much has been made of the smartness of Obama's new team. But I'm hoping that their defining characteristic won't be their IQs but their willingness to confront reality and take responsibility for their decisions.

It's time to say goodbye to the "Who Could Have Known?" era. It's time to know things again. And to know that you know them.

HuffPost Action Alert:

For Small Business Owners: Please read Tim Berry's latest post and take this HuffPost survey about how the recession is affecting your business.

For Everyone: Check out Jesse Kornbluth's terrific post on what we can all do the week after Christmas to "jump start the Obama years" by helping those who are struggling during these hard economic times.

Monday, December 1, 2008

MIAMI (AP) -- Max Rameau delivers his sales pitch like a pro. "All tile floor!" he says during a recent showing. "And the living room, wow! It has great blinds."

But in nearly every other respect, he is unlike any real estate agent you've ever met. He is unshaven, drives a beat-up car and wears grungy cut-off sweat pants. He also breaks into the homes he shows. And his clients don't have a dime for a down payment.

Rameau is an activist who has been executing a bailout plan of his own around Miami's empty streets: He is helping homeless people illegally move into foreclosed homes.

"We're matching homeless people with people-less homes," he said with a grin.

Rameau and a group of like-minded advocates formed Take Back the Land, which also helps the new "tenants" with secondhand furniture, cleaning supplies and yard upkeep. So far, he has moved six families into foreclosed homes and has nine on a waiting list.

"I think everyone deserves a home," said Rameau, who said he takes no money from his work with the homeless. "Homeless people across the country are squatting in empty homes. The question is: Is this going to be done out of desperation or with direction?"

With the housing market collapsing, squatting in foreclosed homes is believed to be on the rise around the country. But squatters usually move in on their own, at night, when no one is watching. Rarely is the phenomenon as organized as Rameau's effort to "liberate" foreclosed homes.

Florida - especially the Miami area, with its once-booming condo market - is one of the hardest-hit states in the housing crisis, largely because of overbuilding and speculation. In September, Florida had the nation's second-highest foreclosure rate, with one out of every 178 homes in default, according to Realty Trac, an online marketer of foreclosed properties. Only Nevada's rate was higher.

Like other cities, Miami is trying to ease the problem. Officials launched a foreclosure-prevention program to help homeowners who have fallen behind on their mortgage, with loans of up to $7,500 per household.

The city also recently passed an ordinance requiring owners of abandoned homes - whether an individual or bank - to register those properties with the city so police can better monitor them.

Elsewhere around the country, advocates in Cleveland are working with the city to allow homeless people to legally move into and repair empty, dilapidated houses. In Atlanta, some property owners pay homeless people to live in abandoned homes as a security measure.

In early November, Rameau drove a woman and her 18-month old daughter to a ranch home on a quiet street lined with swaying tropical foliage. Marie Nadine Pierre, 39, has been sleeping at a shelter with her toddler. She said she had been homeless off and on for a year, after losing various jobs and getting evicted from several apartments.

"My heart is heavy. I've lived in a lot of different shelters, a lot of bad situations," Pierre said. "In my own home, I'm free. I'm a human being now."

Rameau chose the house for Pierre, in part, because he knew its history. A man had bought the home in the city's predominantly Haitian neighborhood in 2006 for $430,000, then rented it to Rameau's friends. Those friends were evicted in October because the homeowner had stopped paying his mortgage and the property went into foreclosure.

Rameau, who makes his living as a computer consultant, said he is doing the owner a favor. Before Pierre moved in, someone stole the air conditioning unit from the backyard, and it was only a matter of time before thieves took the copper pipes and wiring, he said.

"Within a couple of months, this place would be stripped and drug dealers would be living here," he said, carrying a giant plastic garbage bag filled with Pierre's clothes into the home.

He said he is not scared of getting arrested.

"There's a real need here, and there's a disconnect between the need and the law," he said. "Being arrested is just one of the potential factors in doing this."

Miami spokeswoman Kelly Penton said city officials did not know Rameau was moving homeless into empty buildings - but they are also not stopping him.

"There are no actions on the city's part to stop this," she said in an e-mail. "It is important to note that if people trespass into private property, it is up to the property owner to take action to remove those individuals."

Pierre herself could be charged with trespassing, vandalism or breaking and entering. Rameau assured her he has lawyers who will represent her free.

Two weeks after Pierre moved in, she came home to find the locks had been changed, probably by the property's manager. Everything inside - her food, clothes and family photos - was gone.

But late last month, with Rameau's help, she got back inside and has put Christmas decorations on the front door.

So far, police have not gotten involved.

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